EKS
Definition
Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is an AWS managed service that simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters, reducing operational
Use Cases
- Snap Inc.: Run containerized microservices and internal platforms on Kubernetes with AWS-managed operations — Snap has publicly discussed using Kubernetes on AWS; a common managed approach on AWS is EKS, where teams run services on worker nodes (EC2 or serverless Fargate) while AWS manages the Kubernetes control plane and integrates with IAM, VPC networking, and load balancers. (Managed Kubernetes reduces time spent maintaining the control plane and helps teams standardize deployments and scaling across many services.)
- Expedia Group: Modernize application delivery with Kubernetes for faster releases and elastic scaling — Expedia Group has publicly shared its use of Kubernetes and AWS; using EKS is a typical pattern to centralize cluster operations while application teams deploy via Kubernetes manifests/Helm and use AWS integrations (ALB/NLB, IAM roles for service accounts, CloudWatch logging). (Improved deployment consistency and faster iteration by adopting a standardized container platform with managed cluster operations.)
- The LEGO Group: Scale digital commerce and customer-facing services using containers and Kubernetes on AWS — LEGO has publicly discussed running workloads on AWS and using containers/Kubernetes; with EKS, teams commonly run microservices on Kubernetes, use autoscaling, and integrate with AWS managed databases, caching, and observability services. (Better ability to handle traffic spikes and improve reliability by scaling services horizontally on a managed Kubernetes platform.)
Provider Equivalents
- AWS: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Azure: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- GCP: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- OCI: Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE)
Frequently Asked Questions
- What's the difference between Amazon EKS and ECS?
- EKS runs Kubernetes, which is an open-source container orchestration system with a large ecosystem and portable APIs. ECS is AWS’s own container orchestrator (not Kubernetes). Choose EKS if you want Kubernetes compatibility/portability and Kubernetes tooling; choose ECS if you want a simpler AWS-native experience without managing Kubernetes components.
- When should I use Amazon EKS?
- Use EKS when you need Kubernetes features (operators, CRDs, Helm ecosystem), want portability across environments, or have multiple teams that benefit from standardized Kubernetes-based deployment and scaling. It’s a good fit for microservices, platform engineering, and workloads that need advanced scheduling, autoscaling, and service-to-service networking patterns.
- How much does Amazon EKS cost?
- EKS pricing typically includes a per-cluster control plane fee plus the cost of the worker compute and supporting resources. Worker costs depend on whether you use EC2 nodes or AWS Fargate, plus charges for EBS storage, load balancers, data transfer, and logging/monitoring (for example, CloudWatch). Total cost is driven by number of clusters, node instance types and count, uptime, storage, and network traffic.
Category: containers
Difficulty: advanced
Related Terms
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